Description
Book SynopsisHistorians and anthropologists address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century to illuminate the relationship between violence and difference underlying modern governmental powers
Trade Review“
Discipline and the Other Body offers a brilliant and multifaceted exploration of the ways in which colonial power worked with the human body. Covering a great variety of colonial contexts, the contributors bring to light the connections between what Michel Foucault called biopower and the lived experience of colonial violence.”—Timothy Mitchell, author of
Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity“Here, finally, is a collection that forces us to think broadly and comparatively about the relationship between colonial power and the body, about the very interventions and invasions that made colonialism so embodied a practice. This volume will allow people like myself to teach colonialism in a way that bridges culture, politics, and gender in powerful ways.”—Luise White, author of
Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial AfricaTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Discipline and the Other Body: Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception / Anupama Tao and Steven Pierce 1
Defining and Defiling the Criminal Body at the Cape of Good Hope: Punishing the Crime of Suicide under Dutch East India Company Rule, circa 1652–1795 / Kerry Ward 36
The Burden of Louis Congo and the Evolution of Savagery in Colonial Louisiana / Shannon Lee Dawdy 61
“Sinful Propensities”: Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform, 1770–1870 / Isaac Land 90
The Raj’s Other Great Game: Policing the Sexual Frontiers of the Indian Army in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century / Douglas M. Peers 115
Problems of Violence, States of terror: Torture in Colonial India / Anupama Rao 151
Punishment and the Political Body: Flogging and Colonialism in Northern Nigeria / Steven Pierce 186
Footbinding and Anti-footbinding in China: The Subject of Pain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries / Dorothy Ko 215
An Economy of Suffering: Addressing the Violence of Discipline in Railway Workers’ Petitions to the Agent of the East Indian Railway, 1930–47 / Laura Bear 243
Spirit Discipline: Gender, Islam, and Hierarchies of Treatment in Postcolonial Northern Nigeria / Susan O’Brien 273
Selections from
Castaway / Yvette Christianse 303
Bibliography 317
Contributors 347
Index 349
